


the word is 'bravery'

by Shadows_in_the_Light_of_Day



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Psychological Torture, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Survivor Guilt, Torture, but right now it's mostly just angst, this will probably turn into a hurt/comfort recovery fic EVENTUALLY, well eventual hurt/comfort anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-17 02:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9300038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadows_in_the_Light_of_Day/pseuds/Shadows_in_the_Light_of_Day
Summary: Some of them survive Scarif, but only barely, and not all together. One is picked up by the Rebellion, two by the Empire. Sometimes it’s hard to believe there’s hope when you wake up in the aftermath only to be told your friends are dead. That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to stop fighting.





	1. Chapter 1

Cassian Andor is pulled off the beach in the wake of the blast from the Death Star. Jyn Erso is not. That is all anyone needs to know: that he and Jyn Erso lost each other when the explosion enveloped them, and Jyn was not found, though he was.

His last thought before falling unconscious on the beach is of dying, and his first thought when he wakes in an Imperial prison cell is also of death.

His last thought, during the Battle of Scarif: _it’s not like I didn’t expect to die for the Rebellion. This is as good a time as any._

His first thought, after Scarif: _wait, no, I’m supposed to be dead already._

If Cassian’s emotions has been reversed – stabbing panic on the beach, peace (and an unexpectedly strong sense of relief) at this awakening –it would have been so much better. So much more like normal. But it’s not normal – because when has anything in his life ever been – and he sits up all at once, tearing at the lining of his jacket and finding that it has already been ripped open.

All Rebel Intelligence officers carry suicide pills for situations like this, and the Imperials have already confiscated his. He should have taken it on the beach, just to make sure- He wasn’t supposed to survive the blast. Nothing was supposed to survive the blast.

He lets his hands fall to his sides, staring at the opposite wall of his cell.

 _I survived. Why? How?_ He doesn’t remember being picked up. He doesn’t remember anything between the beach and this prison cell. _It’s not like it matters how they picked me up. I’m here now._

He doesn’t let himself think about what it means that he’s here and alive, particularly without his suicide pill. This is any Intelligence officer’s – really, any Rebel’s, never mind the Intelligence officer bit – worst nightmare. It’s made worse by the realization that he doesn’t even know if their mission succeeded or not.

_It must have. If not, they wouldn’t have had any reason to send ships down during the blast to look for survivors, especially Rebel survivors. We must have done it._

It’s a good thought, but not really a comforting one. Even if – even _if_ they got the plans to the Rebel fleet, the Rebellion may still be unable to destroy the Death Star. And there’s a problem – all too real and pressing, given the circumstances – of the Death Star being able to travel through hyperspace, of how the Death Star might be able to get to the base on Yavin 4 before the Rebellion can figure out how to destroy it, if someone were to give the Empire the location of the base...

If he had died on the beach, there would be no reason to worry about this. If they hadn’t confiscated his pill-

He tries not to think about it. Cassian is no stranger to the Empire’s cruelty. He knows what they may do to him – what they will almost certainly do to him – and he knows he will not be rescued.

The Rebels will not know he’s alive, and even if they do find out somehow, what can they do?

_Even if they could mount a rescue mission, they wouldn’t. Not for one soldier. Even if they wanted to, General Draven wouldn’t let them. He’d know better._

The other option is being broken out by some good-hearted Imperial soldier, but he dismisses _that_ thought as soon as it strikes him. Those brave enough to defect from the ranks of the Empire are so, so few, and Cassian has already encountered more than his share of courageous defectors.

He wonders, suddenly, if Bodhi made it off Scarif. He wonders if any of them made it out, and doubts they did. He already knows Jyn and Kaytoo didn’t. Cassian wishes he had held on to Jyn, that he had been blown to wherever she is now. (Even if that means nowhere and nothingness.) He can’t change it, but he can wish he could have, and he wishes-

He wishes Jyn had survived instead. He does not like what that thought does to him, so he files it away in the box with thoughts of being tortured until he dies, of never being rescued. It’s not that he cares if he dies here. It’s not the death he _wanted_ , not by any means, but he’s too tired to rage against it.

He was supposed to die on the beach at Scarif, but if he dies here instead, he will not try to fight it. Death is death, and, he can only assume, his friends have already gone, so when the time comes, he may as well go too.

He only hopes that he will die before he can be forced to betray the Rebellion.

_Because then everything we did – everything so many others died for – would have been for nothing._

* * *

Jyn wakes in the medical wing on Yavin 4 and tries not to scream, because she knows – somehow, she knows, the instant she wakes – that she is the only one who was saved. She knows even before she demands, desperately, to see her friends, any of them, that they are not here.

The doctors treat her to pitying looks and say nothing. They tell her she is a hero now, tell her that there will be people coming to see her, now that she is awake.

Jyn doesn’t care. She doesn’t want Mon Mothma or any of the Rebellion’s leaders, doesn’t want their praise or pity.

She wants her friends, her only real friends, who she knows are gone because she heard Kaytoo’s dying words over the comlink, because she saw – while Cassian did not – the charred, contorted remains of Rogue One and knew Bodhi had almost certainly died in the explosion. Because she knows that if Baze and Chirrut had made it out, they would be here with her to ease her awakening. (Though, really, that’s how she knew when she woke that none of them had survived. If they had lived, they would have waited for her to wake before rushing off into action again. They were her team, her friends; they would have waited.)

She knows Cassian is dead because she lost hold of him in the blast and did not find him again. (And she wonders if it is her fault that he’s dead, because she was the one who lost him.)

She does not understand why she alone survived, and for the first few hours, she clings to the idea that she is wrong, that the others are here _somewhere_ , although she knows it is not true.

In the end, Mon Mothma comes to see her. Jyn thinks she ought to be somewhere else, maybe planning the Death Star’s destruction to ensure her friends did not die in vain. Someone brings Mon Mothma a chair, and she sits down in silence. Jyn is smart enough to realize that she is trying to find a way to break the news gently.

“They’re all dead,” she says flatly. “Cassian, Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze, Kaytoo. Every one of them died on Scarif. I’m the only one left.”

Mon Mothma tries to tell her that some of Rogue One’s crew members survived, that not everyone is lost, and Jyn would never have found that so insulting before, but now, after everything, she does.

“I knew those people for a few hours,” she hisses. “They don’t matter to me. It’s good they’re alive, I’m glad, but they don’t matter.”

Everyone who ever mattered to her is dead. Her parents, her foster father, and now her friends.

She does not let herself cry in front of Mon Mothma or the doctors, but her injuries were such that, before long, she is one of only a few patients left in the medical wing. Those who are left, if they are even awake to hear her, never comment on how many nights she spends in tears, whether from nightmares or regret.

She’d been at peace with her death on the beach. It had been a cause worth dying for; she’d known that, and she’d been willing. Willing to go, willing to trust the Force for a chance to see her family again. Instead it had taken all she had and left her alive.

Jyn has spent her life fighting for her own selfish right to survive. It seems incredibly unfair that the others – people like Cassian, who has always been fighting for the Rebellion, or Bodhi, who had been so quietly brave for the sake of others – should die instead of her, when _she_ was the one who learned on Scarif that their cause was well worth dying for.

(She hopes, if nothing else, that they all, and especially Cassian, died painlessly.)

* * *

Bodhi had not been ready to die, but he had been willing, and he had accepted his death in the few seconds between when the grenade was tossed into his ship and when it exploded, enveloping his ship, enveloping him.

Except maybe, maybe not. Maybe, in reality, in the moments before Rogue One was blasted apart, Bodhi had scrambled as far away from the explosion as he could. Maybe that is why he wakes again. Because he did not face his death with bravery, because he tried to escape it. He’s not sure. He doesn’t remember.

He wakes in an Imperial prison cell. His head aches, and he doesn’t even know how the battle ended. He does not know if his death – or not-death, as the case may be – was worth anything.

He tries to remember, but the last thing he remembers is the grenade clattering onto the floor next to him. He doesn’t know how he survived. He only knows that he shouldn’t have, that he wouldn’t have tried to if he’d known what was going to happen to him.

Pretty much his worst fear at this point is that someone will torture him _again_ , but-

He’s not going to think about torture, nor about how the Rebellion, even its most extreme branches, tends to have good intentions _somewhere_ , but the Empire never does. He tells himself this, reminds himself there’s no point in worrying. It doesn’t help.

His head hurts.

He wonders if the Empire has anything that can top Saw Gerrera’s psychic creature, and decides it probably does. This thought does not help his rapidly increasing panic at all.

Bodhi curls into the corner of his cell…and realizes belatedly that his goggles are gone. He’s actually not sure if he was even wearing them anymore by the time Rogue One exploded. It’s such a small thing, but he can’t remember it, and it frustrates him.

_Maybe if I could remember anything important, I could find a way out of here._

He tries to make himself sleep – because he knows they’ll torture him eventually, and if he’s well-rested he should be able to stand it, right? But his sleep, when he does manage to calm himself down enough to rest, is fitful and interrupted by nightmares. He falls asleep and then wakes, over and over again until he feels he will go mad with lack of sleep and terror mixed together. His nightmares are rapidly gaining some variety, which would be nice, except they _all_ leave him screaming, and when he’s stopped screaming, his only options are either to fall back into those same nightmares, or to sit quietly and _think_ about them.

Which, of course, prompts horrible questions like: _what if Cassian and Jyn and everyone else_ died _? What if they died and we didn’t even manage to transmit the plans?_

_What if some Imperial officer decides to torture me and I end up telling them everything?_

And, ludicrously: _what if I go totally insane?_

Ludicrous, because he is already so close to it. He’s not completely sure he’s not already insane. He’s not completely sure of anything anymore, except that he’s scared and probably broken – though they’ve done absolutely nothing to him yet – and he wants to go home.

Not that he has a home to go back to. Jedha City is gone, and even were it not, he couldn’t have gone back there. It would have put everyone in danger. Maybe it’s better like this, better they’re all dead. The Empire can’t hurt them now. (Though, of course, the Empire is the reason they’re dead in the first place.)

Jedha’s gone. He doesn’t have a home.

(But in hyperspace on the way to Eadu, he’d woken everyone else, screaming from nightmares that tricked him into thinking he was back in Saw Gerrera’s cave. And – rather than shouting at him or telling him to shut up – they had all stayed there with him. Cassian, Jyn, Chirrut, even Baze. And he’d thought-

But what does it matter what he thought? Even if his friends made it off Scarif by some miracle, he is here, and he is alone.)

Bodhi is imprisoned, friendless, and a traitor to the Empire. And, though he doesn’t want to admit it, he’s terrified.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Program error: ability to pretend not to care, compromised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somewhat shockingly, I return with a second chapter! This one makes some references to a Bodhi-centric oneshot I wrote a few weeks ago, "secrets stifled and yet heard", which can be found...on my profile. It's not actually necessary to read the oneshot in order to understand this chapter, though.

By the time the stormtroopers come with orders to take him for interrogation, Cassian no longer knows how long he’s been here. He knows it can’t have been more than a few weeks, at most, but at the same time, it feels like forever. He should have kept better track of his meals, scratched a mark on the wall every time the guard shifts rotated, something. But he’d hoped – foolishly, of course – to be dead within days of his capture.

He cannot stop them from taking him, and he does not try. He tries to tell himself that he can withstand anything they do to him.

 (In reality, he knows he can’t, but he tells himself that he can, that they will dispose of him quickly if he does not cooperate with them, and that desperate, stupid idea keeps him walking toward the interrogation. He has no way to know, after all, that this will be something he does not want to witness.

He has no reason to think that this interrogation is not intended to be his own.)

Cassian has not let himself spare much thought for the nature of the torture he will almost inevitably endure. Now, though, he has no choice but to think about it, and though he doesn’t want to admit it, the thought rather frightens him.

He is – was; he supposes he’s as good as dead now – an Intelligence officer. The things he knows, the things he’s seen, could have the potential to cripple the Rebellion. He won’t crack, he promises himself-

And then he hears the sound of a respirator, realizes that this is going to be much worse than he thought, and that’s about the point that the stormtroopers release his arms and shove him to the floor.

Cassian keeps his gaze carefully trained on the ground as heavy footsteps echo around him, thinking of all the things he’s heard about Darth Vader, wondering if there’s any possible way to defend himself against someone like this.

He doubts there is.

“Cassian Andor.”

He doesn’t reply, not only because he has nothing to say, but because he’s not sure he can.

_Give me courage._ He doesn’t know who – or what – he’s praying to, but maybe something, somewhere, will hear him.

The footsteps echoing in his ears suddenly cease. He thinks Vader is about to say something, and then-

“Lord Vader? The other prisoner is ready.”

_Other…prisoner?_ Cassian can’t stop himself from looking up, glancing around in search of this other prisoner. _Who? Who would it be?_ And, somehow, above all his other thoughts: _Please let it not be Jyn._

Vader turns to the officer at his side. Cassian wishes he could see his face, just so he could have some hint of what’s going through Vader’s head. It’s hard to anticipate anything when he can’t even _try_ to read Vader’s expression.

“Bring him in.”

_‘Him’. Not Jyn then. Maybe not anyone I know. I hope it’s no one I know._

The door at the other end of the chamber slides open, and for one blessed moment Cassian doesn’t realize who the second prisoner is. For that moment, he thinks this will be easy. That this other prisoner – whoever they are – will know, as he does, that the Rebellion is more important than either of their lives. He hopes that the fear of being the first to break will be enough to get them through this without betraying their comrades.

Then there’s a shocked, stuttering “ _Cassian_?”, and he realizes.

_Shit, no. He was supposed to get out. He was on the ship, he had every chance-_

It is at that moment that Cassian realizes how much he wanted to believe Bodhi – and Baze and Chirrut; everyone, really – had managed to escape Scarif. He’s almost shocked at how terrible it feels to realize that Bodhi, at least, didn’t.

(It feels cold and sharp in his chest, sick and anxious in his stomach, a sudden reminder that he should not get attached to anything the Empire can kill. It feels like the loss of all hope, but then, he’s not sure he’s ever _really_ hoped in anything beyond the success of their cause, so maybe that’s not what it is.)

“Cassian?” Bodhi whispers.

Cassian tries to say something, and finds he can’t. He wishes Bodhi would pretend not to know him. He wishes he wasn’t always thinking of horrible things, like how easy it will be for Vader to exploit whatever Bodhi feels about him.

(He refuses to think about how his own feelings can be exploited. He won’t let them be exploited. He can pretend not to care.)

“Do you know this pilot?” asks the officer at Vader’s side. (His aide? Cassian has no idea. Perhaps this officer is the Empire’s torturer when Vader is not available.)

Cassian stares at the ground and says nothing.

“You cannot lie to me.” Vader’s voice is startlingly menacing, suddenly. Bodhi’s eyes go wide with seemingly random horror, and still Cassian keeps his silence. He doesn’t know how many of the strange rumors surrounding Vader are true, and he won’t willingly condemn Bodhi – or himself – to whatever Vader has in store for them. He will not lie; he will not tell the truth. He will keep his silence. That might save them. He is gambling on it saving them.

(In retrospect, it was a foolish gamble to make.)

“Very well,” Vader says, and turns away from Cassian, toward the troopers restraining Bodhi. (To Cassian, it looks more as if they’re holding Bodhi up; he’s shaking so badly that it’s a wonder he’s able to stand at all.)

“Let him go.” The stormtroopers release Bodhi, and he crumples to his knees, staring past Vader at Cassian. Cassian, trying to look anywhere but at Bodhi, notices the officer at Vader’s side slip forward with a pair of binders a full thirty seconds before Bodhi does.

“No!” Bodhi’s voice is sharp, infused with sudden panic. “No, please, it’s okay, I’m not going to run, you don’t have to-“

The troopers grab Bodhi’s shoulders, pinning him in place. Bodhi shudders, his voice rising in desperation.

“Please, you don’t have to- I’m, I’m the pilot, you don’t-“

(Cassian remembers: on the way to Eadu, Bodhi woke screaming from nightmares, convinced he was still being tortured by Saw Gerrera. And he realizes: anything that reminds Bodhi of what happened to him on Jedha might be enough to send him into an irreversible panic.

He can only imagine how Vader would react to that.)

“Bodhi!” Cassian’s surprised at how deeply the pilot flinches at the sound of his name. “Bodhi, look at me. _Look at me_. Just me, look at me. Pretend nothing bad is happening.”

Bodhi stares at him, eyes round.

“Cassian-“

“Just,” he says, “just look at me.”

Bodhi does, and Vader motions his aide forward again. Bodhi flinches, his eyes flickering away from Cassian’s.

“You’re the pilot, right?” Cassian coaxes. “Bodhi? Bodhi Rook, look at me. It’s okay. You delivered the message – Galen’s message, remember? You did it, you’re going to be _fine_ …”

The binders snap closed around Bodhi’s wrists. He whimpers, but his eyes do not flicker from Cassian’s.

“We’re not going to be okay,” Bodhi says. “That’s a lie, Cassian. You can’t lie here, you _can’t_ …”

“That is correct,” says Vader. “You will not lie to me, will you, Bodhi Rook?”

“N-no?” Bodhi’s eyebrows furrow in confusion. “I…no? I told the truth, I-“

“Then tell me,” Vader commands, “why you defected.”

“I, I was dissatisfied…s-so I…”

“That is not all.”

Bodhi shakes his head frantically. “No, no, that’s it, I swear, I was dissatisfied, so when Galen-“

His eyes go wide with inexplicable terror. “No. No, no, no, _please don’t_ -!”

“What are you doing?” Cassian gasps. “Stop- Bodhi, Bodhi, look at me-”

Bodhi’s hands are bound and useless, scrabbling frantically against his hair. His entire body is shaking now.

“Please don’t! Please, I t-told the truth- I-I’m the pilot- Galen said-“

Bodhi screams. Cassian forgets himself, forgets that he is supposed to pretend not to care, and springs across the room to Bodhi. He gets halfway before the troopers catch up to him, and he tries desperately to break their hold on him, shouting: “You don’t understand what you’re doing! If you keep doing that, he’ll lose his mind! He’ll be useless to you! Is that what you want?”

He tries to fight the stormtroopers, and can’t – they’re bigger than he is, and there are two of them, and even his desperation can’t overcome them. Bodhi screams and begs, and Vader stands, inscrutable, seemingly unaffected by the pain he is inflicting. He asks questions, and Bodhi answers – and Cassian tries not to listen, because he has no right to – and what Bodhi does not want to answer, Vader pries out of his mind and repeats back to him.

Cassian hears about Galen Erso, about Bodhi’s family, but most of what Bodhi says is too broken up by sobbing to make much sense.

He’s beginning to wonder – does Vader plan to keep going until Bodhi has nothing left to give? And if so – will Vader do the same to him next? He knows Bodhi is no soldier, that he probably has no understanding of how to resist the torture, but Vader is sifting through his mind with almost impossible ease. If Vader did the same to him, if he broke- _What will happen to the Rebellion if I betray them?_

He never finds out. A second Imperial officer enters, paling a little as his eyes fall on Bodhi.

“L-Lord Vader, we’ve just received a transmission from the Emperor. Your presence is requested.”

Vader turns and nods at the officer, glancing down briefly at Bodhi and Cassian.

“Perhaps we shall finish this later,” he says, and sweeps from the room, his aide following. The troopers remain, of course, but the ones holding Cassian loosen their grip, and he scrambles away from them, to Bodhi’s side. Bodhi is curled into a loose, trembling ball, still mumbling under his breath.

“I, I told the truth- I’m the pilot- Galen said I’d be safe- _Galen,_ _help me_ -”

He hits his bound hands against his forehead, sobbing.

“Bodhi-“ Cassian fumbles for the restraints, pulls Bodhi’s hands away from his head to try and release him. “Bodhi, it’s over. I lied, it’s not going to be okay, but it’s over. I’m sorry- Bodhi? Bodhi, can you hear me?”

Bodhi has gone still, rigid, curled in on himself like a frightened child.

(Cassian remembers: on the way to Eadu, when Bodhi couldn’t stop shaking after his panic attack, Cassian had hugged him on impulse, not really thinking, and it had helped calm him down somehow. He realizes: if it worked once, it might work again.)

Bodhi is smaller than him, and so thin that it’s almost worrying. When Cassian tries to pull him up, Bodhi curls close to him, hiding his face in Cassian’s tattered jacket.

It is not easy to bring him back from wherever his mind has wandered off to. Cassian tells him all the remotely comforting things he can think of – reassurance, praise, reminders that Bodhi fulfilled his mission – and slowly, Bodhi comes back.

“Cassian?” Bodhi asks. His voice is still shaking. “Cassian, are you really alive?”

_Not for long, not here,_ he thinks, but that is something he knows he can’t tell Bodhi.

“Yeah.” He holds Bodhi tighter, already bracing for the moment when he will have to let him go. (Like he let Jyn go on the beach, when he lost her.) “I’m alive. You’re alive. We’re both alive, we’re going to get through this. It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re here, you’re alive, you’ll be okay.”

He hopes Bodhi can’t tell he’s lying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear every time I try to write him, Cassian looks at my outline and decides to do the exact opposite of what I've planned. Also, the chapters were supposed to be structured with a POV from each of the main characters, but it wasn't working out for this one, so I guess we'll see how things progress. I'm expecting the chapters to get longer eventually, though. 
> 
> Also, I think a plot is starting to emerge! Maybe. We may just all have to wait and see what happens. And thank you all again for all your lovely comments; I really appreciate them! :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> System error: ability to suppress unwanted memories, not found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, welcome back to Shadow's fic, where there is no update schedule and the chapter summaries have a theme, which, as far as we know, has nothing to do with the actual story.

It would have been too soon no matter how long the troopers had waited, but to Bodhi, it feels like he’s only been back in his head for a moment before they’re tearing him away from Cassian. It’s like they can see he’s back now – though he doesn’t know how they can see that, when he’s kneeling on the floor with Cassian’s arms around him – and that’s enough for them. Maybe, just because he’s no longer physically screaming, they’ve decided it’s time to give him a reason to panic again.

The stormtroopers pull them apart, and Bodhi can’t- He doesn’t want to be separated from Cassian again doesn’t want to go back in the dark by himself-

Cassian is trying to tell him something, and he can’t hear it. He wants to hear it, even if it’s only another empty assurance that somehow, impossibly, they’ll survive this. He might never see Cassian again after this, he realizes, and he may have just missed the last words his friend will ever say to him.

He can’t make his voice work. Can’t even tell Cassian goodbye, let alone ask him to repeat whatever he just said.

And then they’re marching him away, marching Cassian off in the opposite direction, and he twists around to look at Cassian (one more time, maybe for the last time). But Cassian strides between the guards with his head held high, and if he looks back, Bodhi doesn’t see it.

He never even got to tell Cassian where they are. He’s been listening; he heard the troopers talking on the way down here. The base echoes artificially around him; the troopers talk in undertones about the rumored power of this battle station. Bodhi wants to tell them those rumors aren’t rumors at all, that he saw his home destroyed by this very station.

They’re imprisoned on the Death Star, and Bodhi forgot to tell Cassian. For some reason, he’d thought Cassian needed to know, but when he’d had the chance, he’d forgotten to tell him.

He can’t really remember where he’s supposed to go, but he stumbles along almost robotically between the troopers, because he knows, regardless of where he’s going, that he _has to go_ , that they’ll punish him if he doesn’t do what they want.

(He wonders if they can tell what he wants. He wants a lot of things, really. Right now he wants to run back to wherever Cassian is, even if he can only stay for a second.

He’s always known Cassian is every inch a soldier, while he is not, but the difference is somehow a lot clearer now. Cassian had been trying to form some kind of plan – Bodhi knows that, even if he doesn’t know what that plan _was_ , even if he was the one who messed it up.

He wonders if Cassian blames him for screwing things up.)

The troopers shove him onto the floor of his cell, and he kneels motionless, listening to their footsteps, waiting for them to leave. He can feel panic building in his chest, in his stomach, in his head. (Especially in his head; things are always scrambled up in there lately.) Collapsing in on himself doesn’t help much, but he does it anyway, because at least it makes him feel less alone.

It’s not as if the stormtroopers are going to go and tell Cassian – who is probably sitting stone-faced and dry-eyed in some other cell block – that Bodhi can’t even calm down enough to stop himself from crying.

* * *

Jyn has not been released from the medical wing, although she is nearly healed, and so she slips away one night, out of the base, out onto the landing pad. She knows, of course, that she should not be out here; knows that she will be reprimanded if she is caught.

But she stands staring at the spot where Rogue One had been before they had taken off into the sky on that suicide mission, and does not really care who sees her.

Jyn is not well suited to grief, and in the past, she would have – as she has already tried to do in the days since Scarif – locked her grief away with all the other things she never voluntarily thinks of.

(Only, there were these desperate Rebels who forced her to go on a mission to find Saw Gerrera, and there was this Intelligence officer named Cassian who was supposed to kill her father and didn’t – and has she _forgiven_ him for what he planned to do? She doesn’t know.

But those Rebels – and especially Cassian, _of course, it had to be Cassian_ , had blown open the locked portions of her mind. Even if she tried to force her thoughts back into those battered hatches now, they would not stay there.)

She stands on the landing pad and _wonders_ : if the Rebels had not broken her out of Wobani prison, would she be dead now? And if she had died later, at Scarif, would it have changed anything? If she had died at Scarif, would someone else have lived in her place?

If the others had lived, would she even still be on Yavin 4? Or would she have already stolen weapons and a ship and fled to somewhere beyond this place? Perhaps, she thinks, she ought to do that anyway.

_If I fly away from here – far away, to some planet I’ve never even heard of – I could put all of this behind me. There’s nothing stopping me. I could fly away and never think about any of this again._

She knows how easy it would be to leave. No one could stop her. She’s not sure why anyone would want to. The Rebel leaders will probably not trust her to follow orders now – not, of course, that they trusted her at all before – and, really, what use do they have for her, for another already damaged soldier?

And yet- It was here she had found that it was possible for the memories she’d locked away so carefully to come spilling out. Inside the ziggurat behind her, Draven, Mon Mothma, and Cassian had made a way for those memories to surface and begin the process that would shake her to the core.

Later, there had been a council, and a refusal to help when help was needed most. And there had been a crew – impossibly small, impossibly lonely, but full of desperate hope – who had decided to do what the Rebellion in its entirety had not dared to.

And from this very spot they had taken off. At this very spot, she had stood in the cockpit of a ship about to take off, and _“Rogue- Rogue One”_ , Bodhi had said when they asked for a callsign.

A suicide mission, and she – the one who had wanted only to survive all along, but had been willing to die for this – is the only one standing here in the aftermath.

She hates it. She hates it, and she wants to scream or cry or do _something_ to stop this feeling. She does not want to miss them. She wants to forget them, all of them. And she cannot. She will not, because she will not leave.

_If I left, could I forgive myself?_

She cannot forgive herself regardless. Being alive when the others are dead is offense enough – and she has committed incalculable crimes beyond that, she knows, if no one else does. (Draven knows; perhaps he will bring it up when she goes to him asking, offering, begging to take Cassian’s place, as she knows she _will_ do, as she knows she _must_ do.)

Jyn is not well-suited to grief. She has clung too tightly to life – shoving down her memories and pain in order to keep going – to know what to do with such uncontainable grief now. There is a part of her – raw and gaping and shattered – that says: _let it consume you, let it fill you up  until there is nothing left. It will feel better, to be so broken that you can no longer feel._

But the part of her that helped her survive this long will not allow that. Jyn herself will not allow it. It is not what the others – the ones who died, whom she cared about in spite of herself and could perhaps have loved and trusted given time – would want.

She has been a soldier this long. She will be a soldier again.

She will not let something like this consume her when she has survived so much else. Even if it _is_ breaking her, she will do nothing to aid in the process. Instead she will fight.

All she can do, she reasons, is fight. It is all she has ever done.

* * *

Bodhi can’t-

_Stop-_

Screaming-

There was once a dark, cold cave, and a terrible monster. Before the cave and monster, there was Galen Erso. Before Galen Erso there was…something else, but Bodhi doesn’t remember it. Maybe there wasn’t anything there after all.

He tries to remember. Maybe if he remembers he’ll be able to stop screaming. Is he still screaming? Maybe someone else is screaming. Maybe Cassian. _Where’s Cassian?_

He doesn’t have trouble remembering Cassian. Maybe because Cassian is new. Cassian is from _after_ , rather than _before_. When he tried to sort out his jumbled memories, Bodhi quickly realized how much more trouble he has with _before_ than he does with _after_.

(He wonders why he had to let the worst thing that happened to him become the defining point of his life – the thing that separates _before_ and _after_ – but maybe he couldn’t help it. Maybe that wasn’t his fault either.)

“Cassian is _after_ ,” he whispers – he thinks he’s the one speaking, anyway. Maybe he’s not. The voice seems too hoarse to be his. _Cassian is easy to remember,_ Bodhi wants to say, but does not, because it is too personal to talk about in prison, where anyone could be listening, _because he helped_ me _remember._

“I’m Bodhi Rook,” he forces himself to say. “I’m – I was? – a cargo pilot.”

_I’m the pilot. I’m the pilot. I’m the pilot._

“Galen sent me to deliver a message. Things…didn’t go as planned.”

(Sometimes Bodhi wonders if Galen had known that things would go wrong. He wonders if Galen thought of him as expendable, if that was why he sent Bodhi to deliver his message. He tries to think that’s just misplaced paranoia. He tries to remind himself that his brain doesn’t work so great anymore.)

“I got sort-of maybe tortured. Things got messed up in my head. Some things didn’t go back where they were supposed to. It’s okay. Cassian says it’s not going to happen again.”

Except it _did_ happen again, and Cassian couldn’t stop it. _Not Cassian’s fault. Nobody’s fault._

It feels like it might be his own fault. Maybe if he were braver – _like Cassian is_ – maybe if he could just pretend to be okay – _like Cassian does_ – this wouldn’t have happened to him.

He can’t let himself think like this. He’s not going to get anywhere thinking like this. He’s not going to somehow get _better_ by thinking like this.

Bodhi sits in the dark and hums the same song over and over. He thinks maybe his mother – or his sister? he knows it was a woman’s voice singing – used to sing it to him, to calm him down. But he can only remember a little bit, a fragment of melody so simple even he can’t forget it.

He wishes he could replace all the mess in his head with songs. He wouldn’t mind not remembering anything else if his head were full of songs.

_Songs, and Cassian. I don’t want to forget about Cassian. He helped me remember, so I have to remember him._

* * *

In the end, Jyn is summoned before the Rebel Alliance’s council long before she can manage to slip past the doctors out of the medical wing. Someone must have told them she might run. (It was, she thinks, ever so slightly bitterly, probably Draven. She doubts the General trusts her, even now.)

She convinces the doctors that she is well enough to walk to the conference room alone, but she is still limping a little, and trying to disguise it as she enters.

Mothma is there, and Draven, and other Rebel officers she does not know – but must, she is sure, get to know soon enough.

They stand in a circle around the table – and Jyn looks into the shadows at the corners of the room, almost expecting to see Cassian there, and when she does not find him the pain in her chest is unexpectedly sharp.

“Jyn Erso,” Draven begins, and this time Jyn does not wait to see what he will say, does not wait for his praise or pity. (She does not give him the chance to break her mind open as he did last time she was summoned here.)

“I want to fight,” she says. “I want to take Cass- Captain Andor’s place.”

The corner of Draven’s mouth twitches. “Is that so?”

“I’m not a hero,” she says. _Not like Cassian. Not like the others.._ “I’m a soldier. I have always been a soldier. Let me stay. Let me fight.”

_Let me make their loss worthwhile. Let me have something to fight for again._

There is silence, and Jyn cannot bear the things that come crashing into her mind in that silence. She does not know what she will do if they send her away. She does not know where she will go.

“When you have an answer,” she says, “you know where to find me.”

She turns to go, takes one, two, three stumbling steps away. She hopes the council will attribute her stumbling to exhaustion and injury, nothing more.

She is almost to the door when Draven speaks.

“Erso. You will remember that insubordination will not be tolerated.” And she knows, then, that he is going to allow her to replace Cassian. (Though it’s not as if anyone ever could.)

“If you can ask that of me,” she says, “then I take it that this council does not plan to make any further decisions like the one that resulted in the death of Captain Andor.”

If anyone replies, she does not hear them. She is out in the corridor again before anyone could have spoken. And she is sure they will be angry with her. She is angry at herself – for speaking, knowing that this is not their doing. She knows that it is entirely likely that Cassian – and all the others; this was never just about Cassian, although his death struck her hardest – would have died anyway.

But there would have been a chance – if the fleet had accompanied them from the beginning, if more ships had made it past the shield gate – of her not being the only one pulled from the aftermath of the blast. There would have been a chance, however slight, of Cassian – and Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze, Kaytoo – being here to walk beside her now.

“Jyn Erso?”

The speaker is a pilot – or, at least, she wears a pilot’s uniform – and she can’t be any younger than Jyn, yet, somehow, her eyes are as wide and adoring as a child’s.

Jyn nods.

“I, um.” The girl stutters when she speaks. It reminds Jyn of Bodhi, somehow, and she can’t-

_“You’re Galen’s daughter?”_

_“You know him?”_

_“Yes.”_

She should have asked Bodhi about Galen when she’d had the chance. Should have gotten more from him than she’d gotten on the way to Eadu. She’ll never have another chance to ask him anything now. There were a lot of things she had meant to ask him.

“I don’t mean to bother you,” the girl is saying, “but I wanted to, to tell you…”

The voice fades in and out, and when she isn’t hearing the girl, Jyn is in Saw Gerrera’s cave hearing her father’s voice for the first time in fifteen years, and the next instant she is on the ship realizing that her biological father sent Bodhi Rook on a mission that nearly ruined him, realizing that the man who raised her was the one who made the decision to ruin Bodhi.

“You were so brave and it, it really inspired me – well, us, all of us,” the girl is saying, and Jyn looks at her, no taller than she is and twice as frightened, and remembers what it felt like to be young and zealous for a cause.

(Isn’t she still young? Yes, but she’s been fighting for this cause for what feels like her whole life. She may be young, but she is zealous no longer.)

“This isn’t a question of bravery,” she tells the pilot. “It’s a matter of doing what’s right, regardless of the consequences. It’s…it’s not giving up even when you’re too late to save some people.”

_“I guess I was too late,” says Bodhi, staring down at his hands._

“You’re already doing the right thing,” she says, “so keep doing it. Don’t stop. You have a cause. Keep- Keep hoping in it.”

The pilot’s face breaks into a grin. Jyn smiles wanly back at her, and does not tell the girl that to hope zealously in their cause forever is impossible. She does not tell her that she will eventually lose hope, and that she will keep fighting anyway.

She does not tell her that the only reason that she, Jyn Erso, has not already left the Rebellion for lack of zealous fire, is because she has not the faintest idea where else she could go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently, despite Cassian not even BEING in this chapter, he's still somehow important to the storyline. (He'll be back next time, don't worry. ;) )
> 
> Also, the novelization has ended me and I'm not even 100 pages in yet. So much angst. :'D Also character development! The novelization makes my character-obsessed heart glad. Also, apparently it prompts me to write lots of unplanned Jyn angst, which is also fun. 
> 
> I know there's been a lot of angst in this story so far, and not much else, but hopefully things should start picking up a bit soon. Thank you all for your support; it's really fun to see all the lovely comments! :)

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I have no idea where this came from? I was just trying to write something as an excuse to torture Bodhi (and consequently Cassian), but then Jyn suddenly insisted she be included, and I appear to now have a full-fledged AU on my hands. I guess we'll see how that goes. I've got a vague idea of what I want to do in coming chapters, though I can't make any promises on update schedules of any kind. But I'll do my best!


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